Monthly Archives: May 2016

As you may know, in January it was agreed that Preston Candover Village Hall Trustees and the CVCS Committee would explore the feasibility of housing the community store in an extension of the village hall. We are pleased to report that we believe we can make this idea a success!

To this end, the parties have signed a “Heads of Agreement” and agreed that the CVCS Committee should project manage the design and build of the extension on behalf of the Village Hall Trustees and furthermore organise the fundraising effort. Arrangements have been made for regular reporting to the Village Hall Committee, and day-to-day liaison with nominated members.

Once the extension has been built, CVCS will lease the space from the Village Hall Trustees and run the community store as described in the original business plan. This will give the Village Hall Trustees much-needed funds to continue providing their vital community services.

We will have new drawings shortly which we hope will galvanise support for the project and enable everyone to share in our vision.

In other news, members of our committee are volunteering for Canterton Stores helping to support the shop (as you may recall it is important that the shop remains open so that the existing post office contract can be transferred to the new enterprise (a new post office contract would be significantly less favourable)). The added benefit of this is that we are gaining valuable experience! If you would like to join us, please let us know or ask in the shop. If you don’t have the time, you can still help by shopping there – they take daily bakery orders, sell delicious local foods and have recently started stocking meat from Evan’s Butchers (orders also available).

We are as determined as ever that Preston Candover and the surrounding villages will soon benefit from all the services a Community Store can offer and we thank you for your continued interest.

We continue to explore the viability of the Community Store being housed in a new extension of the village hall and we hope to have a conclusion this month.

In the meantime, we have taken another opportunity to learn more about setting up and running a community store by attending a local conference organised by Hampshire County Council.

Hampshire Village Shops Network Conference.

Lucy Muncey and Carolyn Dawnay of the CVCS committee and Mike Carpenter, as a member of the Village Hall committee and joint working party for the extension project, attended the Hampshire Village Shops Network Conference together. This conference is always held at a shop and this time it was in Braishfield’s Village Pantry. It’s a light, bright and very welcoming shop in an extension to their village hall, which had only been opened a few days earlier. We have made contact with one of their committee members to talk to them about how they went about extending their village hall and how they financed it.

Members of another store, Heath Stores, told a very inspiring story about how, through hard work and a lot of imagination, they have turned their old fashioned shop into a thriving destination.

There were also presentations from the Rural Shops Alliance, the Plunkett Foundation community store forum and Hampshire Fare covering everything including store management, sourcing and marketing local foods and shop layout. The day was very useful and motivating for the team!